5 June, 2025, 10:15-11:45 a.m., online only.
The slime mold Physarum polycephalum is a single-celled organism which due to its ability to form efficient networks has been the subject of research by computer scientists and mathematicians for more than two decades. The fact that despite its simple structure it manifests complex behaviors and can perform complicated tasks has turned it into a model organism in research on the origins of cognition and intelligence. Since it is both easy and safe to grow it has also become an object of interest not only to biologists and computer scientists, but also to bio-artists and a wider public. Physarum not only travels between scientific and artistic laboratories, but also makes their boundaries porous and susceptible to contamination by concepts and narratives brought in from other contexts. This talk will take as a point of departure one such narrative, concerning first contact, and trace its relationship to analogous narratives in anthropology and science fiction in order to explore possible methods for including microorganisms as participants in ethnographic research. It will conclude with proposing rhythmanalysis as one of such methods.
Maria Dębińska is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences, and an Affiliated Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin. She specializes in anthropology of gender and sexuality, social studies of science. In the years 2020-2025 she was principal investigator in the research project “Slime mold as method. Ethnography of scientific practice” funded by the National Science Center in Poland.